Will Wright on his new venture

Last year, game designer Will Wright left Electronic Arts to found Stupid Fun Club, an entertainment think tank that EA also invested in. Today, fans of Wright and other like-minded wannabe TV executives can join Wright in producing his new project, the upcoming TV series, Bar Karma, headed for Current TV in February 2011. Wright designed StoryMaker, a software program for scripting stories, that participants can use to pitch ideas and plot developments for the series. (You can find StoryMaker on Current TV's Creation Studios web site.)

Current TV president for digital media Paul Levin and Bar Karma general manager David Cohn recently gave an exclusive reveal of the project to USA TODAY with Wright joining via web cam. Current TV co-founder Joel Hyatt and CEO Mark Rosenthal, as well as Wright's co-executive producer Albie Hecht (whose studio Worldwide Biggies will produce the show) provided insights in subsequent interviews. Here are some of their comments.

How did this project come about?Wright: A year and a half ago-ish we pitched it. I'd been playing with how do we take storytelling that we have seen in things like The Sims and bring it into a linear media. It seems that the Web is becoming the connective tissue for these experiences. So we came to Current; it's almost run more like a tech startup. I talked to a few other TV networks about this idea and they had no idea what I was talking about. They didn't even know what a Web group was. But this has been something we have been working on in the background for a year and a half-ish maybe.

So it was this dynamic of the users of The Sims creating stories that led you to think this might be a model for some type of interactive television?Wright: It was not just the quantity of storytelling that people were doing with The Sims but the fact that so many people were actually consuming these stories. Like any user-generated content, you get about 5% that is really good. What is interesting is that a 100% crowd is pretty good about bubbling the 5% to the top. A lot of them were telling stories independently, but then they started weaving content and characters and storylines. So I think that they really wanted to get more into a communal storytelling sandbox but the structure of The Sims storytelling didn't really make that possible. … It seemed a good area to go into collaborative storytelling. Where we have people working on the same story lines in an interesting way.

Do you kind of see this as an experiment into whether crowdsourcing can lead to creativity rather than chaos?Wright: We want to open this up to any creative opportunity the community wants to have with the show. They have already been involved from square one in terms of 'What treatment?' and 'Who are the characters?' 'What is the setting?' Going forward we are going to want to open it up to a lot of different areas. Storytelling is one thing in particular that people can wrap their arms around. But I think a lot of the experience is about community and there will be a lot of granular areas in storytelling from 'What happens in this scene?' to 'What is the arc of this episode?' to 'What is the arc of the series?' And different people will be attracted to different parts of that … and kind of evangelizing that direction. This is something you see already happening in game communities around storytelling. Look at any Star Trek website or whatever and you see people having these long discussions about 'What if this character turned out to be that?' or whatever it is. Except in this case they are coming to decisions and the decisions are being implemented. In essence, psychologically, they are really in the driver's seat makes these discussions much more meaningful and, hopefully, more emotionally engaging.

Cohn: It is important for us to let them know where we are in the process. We cannot let it go to chaos. We have a show to produce, on time and on budget. And so that is where that interaction between the production team and the community, we believe, will keep it online and we'll direct them let them know how much time is left in that challenge.

Wright: This is what we were doing with the beta community over these last eight months or so. We were experimenting with how much direction we have to give them (and) how much of it is open submissions and creativity on their side. And there is sort of a sweet spot between the two. In a general sense, our template for this is if you have challenges where people have open brainstorming and you have lots of ideas, they rate those ideas and the top ideas bubble to the top and our production team will pick a subset, maybe the five top ideas from that pool that they think are doable, and then those five ideas get further discussion and further refinement and then go to a vote. So I think it is really this interesting hybrid between the totally flat peer-to-peer model and something with a hierarchy. We need a certain amount of top-down editorializing and filtering but we make maximum use of this gigantic Darwinian kind of idea pool.

How does Bar Karma build on Current TV's mission?Hyatt: In many ways Will Wright was the catalyst but it does go back to the origins of Current. The core innovation underlying the founding of the company was that we wanted to empower consumers to contribute in significant ways to the creation of the content that they consume. That was a motivating factor for (co-founder and former vice president) Al (Gore) and for me in starting Current.

I read an article that Will Wright the famous EA game designer who has pioneered some of the most popular games in the world was leaving EA and one of the reasons he was leaving was that he had some interest in seeing what he could do by way of advancing notions of interactive telelvison for which there had been lots and lots of talk but no action. I read that and said, "Will Wright ought to be working with us."

Rosenthal: (Bar Karma) builds on the core values of the brand but also points in the direction of where we want to go in the future, which is really high-quality, long-form programming. We are going to be a network about long-form storytelling about stories that people haven't heard in ways they haven't heard them. This kind of approach is fresh, it's different, it's new and I think can be emblematic of the way we want to take the network. It is really the first in a series of long-form shows that will be the hallmark of the network going forward. I think this allows us to sort of put a stake in ground and hopefully make a bit of a splash.

So how will the Bar Karma production process change today as the online studio opens?Hecht: The first thing that happens is I go from one studio exec to thousands. So I go to listening to thousands of people. ... The essence of the online community will be the StoryMaker engine. We'll be soliciting the challenge to them of posting a synopsis of the stories. Look at the bible, look at the production parameters and give us a synopsis of a story. From there the producers will go into that pool and look at the right stories and put them into the StoryMaker engine, in which people will then have the opportunity to then, essentially, create an online graphic novel.

Is there anything that has surprised you yet?Wright: It surprised me how that model seems to work equally well almost no matter what aspect of this project we are dealing with. It works for 'What kind of setting this should be in,' 'Who are the characters? (and) it works for 'What is the story line?' It turns out to be a pretty good, generic model that I think can eventually apply across music, wardrobe and a lot of other departments. ... We have a brainstorming session and a rating, the production team picks their favorites and they further refine it and then it goes to a vote.

One other big surprise for me was how pragmatically the community approached this whole thing. Our expectation was they would want Star Wars or something like that. But yet they remained very grounded in the practicalities that we had to do this on a weekly basis, we had a budget and I was really surprised in how realistic the community was in terms of scaling their ambitions.

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